


The Taste Of Her

by SloanGreyMercyDeath



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, This is just a thing, i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:55:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27605923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SloanGreyMercyDeath/pseuds/SloanGreyMercyDeath
Summary: Emily’s favorite flavor is the sour taste of disappointment.
Relationships: Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Emily Prentiss
Comments: 11
Kudos: 74





	The Taste Of Her

When asked her favorite flavor, Emily Prentiss always answers “chocolate”. Emily Prentiss always lies. Chocolate is a wonderful flavor, but it’s not her favorite.

Emily’s favorite flavor is the sour taste of disappointment. She is addicted to the salty taste of sorrow, to the bittersweetness of an inevitable goodbye, to the metallic tang of a broken heart. She’d pour tart syrup made from fresh regret on her ice cream and call it the perfect Sunday.

It’s not a flavor that grows on trees, but she learns at a young age how to milk every last drop of hurt out of another person. Some people are harder than others. A green-eyed boy in Russia snaps easily between her sharp teeth, but a long-fingered girl in Peru proves to be a tough nut to crack and Emily has to destroy her sister to splinter her shell.

As she gets older, she finds that secondhand sorrow is just as filling. She sleeps with Johnny, but Michael is the one she devours. The taste of his lost faith is sweet and refreshing. It lingers on her tongue for years.

College is a flurry of quick treats. Depressed students are so easily consumed and discarded. By the time she graduates, she’s sure she’s experienced every flavor of hurt. Emily is the only chef in the world who can cook her favorite meal. She knows she could grow fat from her buffet of bad relationships.

Like a carpenter who builds houses to keep people warm, Emily Prentiss is a master craftsman. Her skills are unparalleled. She can open the most well-guarded of hearts, reach deep into their succulent centers, and swallow the rip fruit of their love in one eager gulp. She leaves them with the pits.

When she joins the JTF-12, she begins a fast. There’s no time to eat for pleasure, but she knows the starving will make the slow consumption of Ian Doyle’s tender heart that much more delicious. When she’s shoved into a car and he’s hauled away, heart-broken and betrayed, she’s proven right. The knowledge that he thinks Lauren Reynolds is dead keeps her full for years.

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t ruin the ‘something’ she has with JJ right away. Emily hasn’t tasted heartbreak or sorrow or disappointment in a long time and Jennifer Jareau seems like the perfect prey. She’s welcoming, inexperienced, vulnerable. It wouldn’t take much to pick her from the vine and burst the sickly-sweet flesh of her decimated dreams.

So, why doesn’t Emily do just that? Why does she suck the marrow from the bones of a park ranger instead? Why does she keep their relationship professional? Deny herself her favorite flavor?

For the first time in her life, Emily Prentiss doesn’t initiate the first kiss. In the corner of a crowded bar, Jennifer Jareau kisses her with a hungry mouth. Emily wonders if this is what it feels like to be eaten whole. A greedy tongue pushes between her lips and Emily understands why some people are so easy to consume.

When they fall into Emily’s bed later, a mess of sweat and skin and sighs, she’s sure that it’s going to be a mistake. There’s no way something this good can last. As her heart beats hard in her chest, JJ moving above her with expert confidence, her mouth fills with the knowledge that this will fall apart and she comes apart with her favorite flavor on her tongue.

Every day they spend together tastes like the last. Instead of feeling satisfied by the preemptively bitter disappointment that fills her senses, she’s left starving. The way JJ touches her, looks at her, moans her name, keeps Emily famished. Even when JJ starts splitting her body between Emily and Will, the hurt doesn’t nourish her. 

Emily Prentiss is left wondering why the pain doesn’t feed her. Jennifer carves promises she won’t keep into Emily’s thighs and the wounds sting unpleasantly. When JJ is gone, Emily sinks her teeth into strangers, but not even the crunch of a lover’s crushed hopes tastes like anything at all.

It takes her a long time to realize the difference between the stolen sadness of another person and the deep ache in her own chest. She’s drinking from the well between Jennifer’s legs when she realizes why she’s so damn thirsty. JJ says her name, the sound curling through the air like smoke and disappearing just as quickly.

Their relationship is nothing but empty calories. JJ might taste like the sweetest candy, but she’s only sugar. There’s no hurt in her. Emily hasn’t cracked her open, hasn’t milked the pain from her, hasn’t ripped the heartstrings from her. It’s Emily that’s being eaten alive.

She’s wasting away while Jennifer Jareau picks her clean. Her attention, affection, adoration is being leached away, leaving her empty and hollow. She could drink for years and only drown.

How did this happen? When did she lose the game she created? Where had she gone? When JJ comes with a cry, Emily has her answer.

Somewhere along the way, she got so used to causing the hurt that tastes so good and she forgot that she was capable of hurting, too. She was so smug that she never considered that JJ was capable of causing the bittersweetness of goodbye. Emily never thought JJ could be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

After her realization, Emily begins to see the danger in Jennifer. The sparkle in her eye glints like cold steel. Her perfect teeth seem sharp and lethal. Fingers that gently caress tender flesh sting like electricity. Where Emily Prentiss catches flies with vinegar, Jennifer Jareau drips honey. Emily is left dodging the sting of her hive.

By the time Doyle reappears in her life, Emily is famished. Jennifer Jareau has two children with someone else, but she spends so much time deep inside Emily, bleeding her dry. The way JJ’s full lips part as she pays close attention to Emily’s weak whimpers proves she knows what she’s doing. She’s on to Emily’s lifelong game and she’s determined to be the best.

While JJ is away, Emily manages to find a way to breathe again. She goes out every chance she has and eats her fill of one-night stands. Her easy smile is like light to a moth and she never goes home hungry. Everyone she kisses while JJ is away asks for more, but she refuses to give it to them, only taking what she wants and leaving them behind.

Then, Doyle’s anger is all she can taste. It reminds her of the time before Jennifer Jareau when no one knew Emily’s flavor and she was the one who consumed. As she lays dying in Derek’s arms, she wonders what tastes better: the acrid desperation in his voice as he begs her to survive or the distant smell of citrus from JJ’s inevitable despair at her death.

She feasts in Paris. Emily had almost forgotten what sweet sorrow foreign heartbreak is. The screamed french tastes like nostalgia in her mouth and she laps it up. She wants to make sure she looks happy and healthy when she returns home. The stolen scrabble games with Jennifer keep her in shape.

The anger, disappointment, angsty relief of the team is tempered by the smile on JJ’s face. Not even an hour passes before Jennifer Jareau is on her knees in her old office, draining Emily of everything she’d gained in Paris. The same pain and self-hatred that filled her before she left floods into the empty spaces.

She wonders if JJ starved while she was gone. Probably not. JJ had a  _ boyfriend _ that she constantly left behind, his frustration and mounting restlessness a cornucopia of delights. She’d also been dealing with a team that thought Emily was dead. She’d been kept well fed.

They fall back into a familiar pattern of eating and starving, always trying to devour and conquer. This time, Emily knows what she’s getting into, so it’s easier to stand her ground. When the team goes out to Ziggy’s, Emily never goes home alone and she never goes home with Jennifer. If JJ wants her, JJ has to come and get her.

She finds that the fight is just as delicious as the meal and this time they eat together. Emily idly wonders if knowing that JJ has a boyfriend waiting at home is what makes it so filling. Every time Jennifer slices Emily’s stomach open with sloppy, impossible promises, she imagines the same words sighed into a faithful man’s chest and she can almost taste the sharp tang of contradiction.

Maybe that imagining is how she ends up contemplating her final meal. In a bank, after an explosion, staring into the dull brown eyes of the man who unknowingly keeps her fed, she knows exactly how she can win this game. She could leave Jennifer Jareau malnourished forever by simply doing nothing at all.

Will tells her to leave, to go to Jennifer, as if he knows exactly what they do when he’s not looking. The clock on his chest counts down and, god, it tastes so good. Emily Prentiss knows exactly what Jennifer Jareau is feeling. Both of her favorite meals might become empty plates and she’s only held back by the strong arms of her team who don’t know anything of hunger at all.

Emily runs a finger over the yellow wire and savors the sour, bitter, heavy taste of holding a man’s life in her hands. He’s trembling and she’s practically salivating at his pungent fear. She thinks about the pain Jennifer would feel if both of them disappeared in the same inevitable goodbye.

Instead of filling her, the thought of JJ’s tears turns her stomach to stone. She isn’t sure what this feeling is, but her satisfaction leaves her as she pictures JJ’s breakdown at the loss. The hurt and pain turns to ash on her tongue, suddenly unpleasantly burnt and inedible. Killing herself and Will tastes like the worst kind of cowardice.

So, she cuts the yellow wire and saves them both for a later time. She stores their pain in plastic containers, puts them in a freezer, and decides that Jennifer Jareau is the one who gets to choose when to feed. Emily doesn’t have the strength to hunt and gather anymore.

She and her unwitting counterpart exit the bank together to a sigh of relief that almost smells good. Her team is grinning at her, tears in their eyes, and their care eases the harsh taste of self-loathing in her mouth. Emily Prentiss wonders if she isn’t the same girl who thrived on smashing hearts open and tearing people apart with her hands. Maybe there is another flavor that tastes better than chocolate and sorrow. She’s not sure what it is.

Jennifer Jareau races toward them and Emily steps aside, ready to be sucked dry as her sometimes lover, never lover, leaps into the arms of the man she saved despite her reservations. Will spreads his arms like warm butter, ready to be eaten like a lazy, late-morning breakfast. The anguish in JJ’s ocean eyes does nothing for Emily’s cravings.

Something crashes into her like a wave and she’s squeezed like a lemon picked fresh from the tree. It’s Jennifer, her sometimes lover, always lover. The hunger in Emily vanishes as she realizes that it was not the taste of leaving, but the sweet flavor of being missed that sustained her. “Please stay” sounds a lot like “I love you” when it follows you out the door.

Jennifer clings to her like she’s water in the desert, like drinking Emily has finally quenched her thirst and there’s room in her mind to think about something other than survival. She pierces Emily’s ear with promises, but this time, they’re ornaments that she can wear proudly. Jennifer tastes like a decision to stay and Emily knows they’ll never go hungry again.

And if the spoiled milk of Will’s love tastes like the richest cream? Well, Emily Prentiss is slow to change and the familiar tart syrup of fresh regret makes a perfect companion to her new favorite flavor of Jennifer’s forever. 


End file.
